Ex-Trump insider sounds alarm over Putin visit: Trump's made ‘mistakes' already

Yahoo

a day ago

Former national security adviser John Bolton sounded the alarm on President Donald Trump's plan to meet Russian leader Vladimir Putin on American soil.
Trump told reporters last week he would be meeting with Putin in Alaska on Friday to discuss an end to the Russia-Ukraine war. In response to the announcement, Bolton told ABC's 'This Week' that Trump meeting with Putin in the United States was a 'mistake.'
'I think Trump has made some mistakes already, number one, in holding this meeting on American soil, legitimizing a pariah leader of a rogue state. Second, he's allowed Putin to get first mover advantage by putting his peace plan on the table first,' he said on Sunday.
'You can already see from Trump's own statements he thinks that Zelenskyy has to make constitutional modifications for Ukraine to cede territory. Now, Zelenskyy has flatly rejected that,' he added.
Trump suggested in comments to reporters that any peace agreement would likely involve 'some swapping of territories,' but did not offer any other details. Bolton said on ABC that Putin sees a meeting with Trump as an 'opportunity' to rebuild a relationship with the U.S. president.
'But what Putin gets more than anything else is an opportunity, one on one, to try and get his magic working again with Trump, applying that KGB training. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, he pushed Trump further than Trump wanted to be pushed. And you saw the reaction,' Bolton said.
'What Putin wants to get back, he's not so worried about the sanctions, he wants the relationship back with Trump. We'll see if he gets it,' he added.
Bolton noted that overall, he believes it's a 'risky meeting upcoming from the perspective, not just of Ukraine, but the Western alliance.'
Trump said his meeting with Putin would come before any sit-down discussion involving Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump also previously agreed to meet with Putin even if the Russian leader would not meet with Zelenskyy. That stoked fears in Europe that Ukraine could be sidelined in efforts to stop the continent's biggest conflict since World War II.
Trump's announcement that he planned to host one of America's adversaries on U.S. soil broke with expectations that they'd meet in a third country. The gesture gives Putin validation after the U.S. and its allies had long sought to make him a pariah over his war against Ukraine.
Early in Putin's tenure, he regularly met with his U.S. counterparts. That dropped off and the tone became icier as tensions mounted between Russia and the West after Moscow illegally annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and faced allegations of meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections.
Putin's last visit to the U.S. was in 2015, when he attended the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York. The meeting in Alaska would be the first U.S.-Russia summit since 2021, when former President Joe Biden met Putin in Geneva.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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